From Inspiration to Emulation

Over the last few months I’ve been examining my writing and note taking workflow in an effort to be more consistent and better blogger. After all I want this site to succeed and be useful to my readers. It somehow happened that I came across a bunch of different bloggers, that have embraced, plain text as the centre of their workflows. People like Michael Schechter, David Sparks, Shawn Blanc, Merlin Mann rely on simple text files to publish the web, capture ideas, write books, run projects etc.
This is not to say to you should dumb your life down and abandon great apps like Evernote or Sprigpad or any task management or map mapping software. These programs have their purpose and strong sides but if you can you should work with as simple tools as possible for as long as there is no negative impact on your work.

Inspired by what I was reading and how well their systems worked, I began to look at different options of adjusting my existing workflow and implementing their ideas and lessons. The tasks wasn’t easy, as they all are Mac users so I needed to find the equivalent applications with similar functionality on Windows platform. Fortunately enough, I was able to find the right software.

The whole setup is based on text files saved in a single Dropbox directory with ResophNotes working as a simple interface allowing me easily create, search and update any file. The speed of this app and simplicity is remarkable. I’m also leveraging Simplenote to deliver the files into my Androind phone. I’m going to leave a more detailed description of my setup for a later post.

Over the recent weeks I’ve been building up my repository of text files, setting up lists, capturing new ideas, transferring some of the reference material. So far, it has been very good. I’m finding that the system works well and I have more trust in it. This means I use it constantly and it’s my first point of call. At this stage there is definitely less clutter and more simplicity with in the whole setup. This really helps to keep the focus and maintain consistency of files names. Although I do come across an odd instance where I need to figure out where a given file goes or how to call it.

I’m really interested in seeing how this system will hold up in the long run. With hundreds of files sitting in one directory will there be any drop in speed or syncing issues? Also will I stick with the file taxonomy or will I end up with massive repository of files that I can’t make any sense of?